Unlike other refugees, the Palestinians have their own set of rules, their own funding and even their own international agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency or UNRWA. To paraphrase George Orwell, all refugees are equal, but some refugees are more equal than others.

In 2012, the United Nations spent six times more on every Palestinian refugee as compared to all other refugees. Like a favored child, the Palestinians have been on the UN’s permanent payroll for over 60 years and are entitled to every service from healthcare to housing and from food rations to education. When it comes to refugees from Syria or Somalia, responsibility falls to the host country to provide basic assistance.

While UNHCR’s approach teaches independence, UNRWA’s approach prepares the Palestinians to be lifelong dependents. Under UNRWA’s framework, Palestinians can continue to be called refugees long after they acquire citizenship and find permanent housing.

UNRWA’s humanitarian mission is undoubtedly important. However, it is being marred by its unspoken political motto of “once a refugee, always a refugee.” By allowing refugee status to pass to Palestinian children and grandchildren, the number of Palestinian refugees has ballooned from a few hundred thousand in 1948 to over five million today. Left unchecked, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians will continue to be added to the UN’s permanent payroll every year.

Let’s apply some simple arithmetic. If about 650,000 Arabs fled Palestine in 1948 (I’m ignoring the smaller number of 1967 refugees in the interest of simplicity) and there are 5 million today, that represents a truly remarkable growth rate of 3.2% per year (the population of India, by contrast, is growing at about 1.7% per year, and that of the US, including immigration, at about 1.1%). If the current trend continues, then, in ten years there will be 6.8 million. The 10 million mark will be reached in 2035, when a Palestinian child born today will be 22 years old. And in 100 years, there will be 116 million Palestinian refugees!

This is clearly unsustainable, but the only ‘solution’ acceptable to the Arabs, to supporters of BDS, to a majority of UN members, and even to our local “Peace Fresno” organization is that all of these Arabs will ‘return to their homes’ in what is today Israel. In the meantime, their ‘oppression’ qualifies them to engage in violent actions.

Prosor continued,

Instead of extending their hand in friendship, the Arab states employed the NIMBY strategy – Not In My Back Yard. Believing that the creation of UNRWA absolved them of any responsibility to their Palestinian brothers, the Arab states passed discriminatory laws. In Lebanon for example, Palestinian refugees are barred from working as doctors, dentists, lawyers, engineers or accountants.

By making the Palestinians the poster children for international victimhood, the Arab states believe they hold a permanent trump card to defame and pressure Israel. While the Arab states are saturated in petrol dollars, the funds mysteriously dry up when it comes to assisting Palestinians and subsidizing UNRWA.

Scan the list of UNRWA’s top contributors and you’ll find it’s exclusively North American and West European countries.

To put it more bluntly: the US and the Europeans are contributingmore than $650 million a year (2011 figure) to help the Arab nations build a weapon to use against the Jewish state. And the Arabs pay almost nothing! What a deal.

And it is more than simply a demographic weapon. UNRWA in Gaza supports Hamas in several important ways, particularly by way of its educational system. Teachers — who are all Gaza Palestinians — use books and materials supplied by the Hamas regime. Many Hamas leaders, including Ismail Haniyeh, are graduates of UNRWA schools, and teachers sometimes moonlight as terrorists.

The question of refugees is just one area in which the UN (and its budget) is grotesquely deformed in the direction of the Palestinians. Everyone knows about the imbalance in General Assembly resolutions, and the biased Human Rights Commission. But don’t forget the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP), and the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People (SCIIHRP), not to mention the Division for Palestinian Rights (DPR), which is responsible for the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, held every year on November 29, the anniversary of the Partition Resolution of 1947.

This is strange since, at the time, the Arabs opposed the resolution, which would have created an Arab state. Of course it also called for a Jewish state, so maybe they are mourning a loss rather than celebrating an offer.

The unique outpouring of love and money for the Palestinians can’t be because the other Arab nations care for them. If they did, they wouldn’t treat them so badly whenever they come in contact with actual Palestinian Arabs. And it certainly can’t be because they are such exemplary world citizens: Palestinian Arabs popularized airline hijacking and suicide bombing (the main ingredients of the worst terrorist attack ever), and have been responsible for several wars in Lebanon, Jordan, Gaza, etc., not to mention terrorism against Israel. How many people are dead that would be alive were it not for Palestinians and their Cause?

I think the explanation is simple: the world loves the Palestinians because of their choice of enemies!

About the Author:Vic Rosenthal created FresnoZionism.org to provide a forum for publishing and discussing issues about Israel and the Mideast conflict, especially where there is a local connection. Rosenthal believes that America’s interests are best served by supporting the democratic state of Israel, the front line in the struggle between Western civilization and radical Islam. The viewpoint is not intended to be liberal or conservative — just pro-Israel.

The author's opinion does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Jewish Press.

If you don't see your comment after publishing it, refresh the page.

Our comments section is intended for meaningful responses and debates in a civilized manner. We ask that you respect the fact that we are a religious Jewish website and avoid inappropriate language at all cost.

If you promote any foreign religions, gods or messiahs, lies about Israel, anti-Semitism, or advocate violence (except against terrorists), your permission to comment may be revoked.

This week I took the official tour of the UN headquarters in New York. I noticed that next to every “pro-Jewish” item in the iconic building, there is something to counterbalance it. Thus, adjacent to Chagall’s stunning stained glass window in the lobby there is a statue of Count Folke Bernadotte, a UN official who was killed by members of the Jewish underground group Lehi in Jerusalem during the War of Independence. Next to a small display on the Holocaust there is a huge exhibition on “Palestine.”.

I attended a session run by the Israeli delegation at the UN. Danielle Brown, an articulate former Canadian who made Aliya, served in the IDF, and graduated from IDC ran the briefing. She was an advisor to Ambassador Ron Prosor. Brown noted how traditionally Israel used to be “bullied” in the UN and was always on the defensive.

Israel has however radically changed its tactics and has gone on the offensive. Now other ambassadors are hesitant to criticise Israel, because each time that an Arab representative gets up to speak of alleged humanitarian violations in Israel, the Israeli representative gets right back up and speaks of actual humanitarian violations, and hypocrisy in that country.

The official tour of the UN building was highly revealing regarding the UN policy of “balance” and fair play. The UN guide led me through the General Assembly room, complete with its “Palestine” “country sign,” during a session.

I was then led to a floor with a display of the results of violence. Some of the highlights included exhibits on landmines, nuclear conflict, and a small display on the Holocaust. The official UN guide did not mention the Holocaust exhibition, but did stop at the display titled “Palestine.” I asked her why she did not talk about the Holocaust exhibition, and she answered that it was “too controversial.” This did not stop her, and every other guide stopping and explaining the “Palestine” exhibition. This large display, on a bright orange background was full of half-truths and misconceptions. It was nothing less than crude Palestinian propaganda, which was lent a veneer of legitimacy by being part of the official UN tour.

When I started to point out some of factual inconsistencies, the guide cut me off and hurried on with the tour. Some of the gems were:

Of the two States to be created under resolution 181 (ii), only one, Israel, has so far come into being as an independent and sovereign State.
This neglects to mention that the Palestinian Arabs, and indeed the entire Arab world, rejected the UN partition plan and tried to annihilate the nascent Jewish State through force of arms. If they would have accepted, as the Palestinian Jews did. there would be no Arab Israel conflict.

In 1948, as a result of the war between Israel and neighbouring Arab states, almost 750,000 Palestinians were uprooted and became refugees.
This fails to contextualise that the “war between Israel and her neighbouring Arab States” was one of self-defense by the Jews after an unprovoked combined Arab armies attack whose sole purpose was to wipe Israel off the map. The majority of Arab refugees, whose numbers are vastly inflated, left without ever seeing an Israeli soldier, in order to facilitate the Arab armies in “finishing their job.” There is no mention of the 830,000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands, some who had been there for thousands of years, who left everything behind.

No other entity or trouble spot in the world had a place on the UN tour (not even Syria, where over seventy thousand civilians have been killed in two years of civil wars). This would seem to indicate a clear bias against Israel, that bastion of democracy and human rights in the despotic Middle East.

UNRWA event displays a map that encourages the delegitimization of Israel by labeling all of Israel as Arab Palestine.

According to Palestinian Media Watch, “At the official launch of two German-funded UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees in the Near East) projects in southern Lebanon, Director of UNRWA Affairs in Lebanon, Ann Dismorr, posed with a map that erases the State of Israel and presents all of it as ‘Palestine.’”.

Some of the cities that are listed as being part of Arab Palestine are Be’ersheva, Jerusalem, Haifa, and Tiberius, which are all presently cities with a Jewish majority located which are mostly located within mainland Israel.

Palestinian Media Watch claimed that this map was a gift from the Palestinian Women’s Union and was presented during the launch of an event dedicated to improving water networks and shelters for the Palestinian community in Lebanon. The Head of Economic Cooperation and Development at the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Lebanon Dr. Hanan Abdul Rida was also present alongside a number of high-ranking Palestinian and Lebanese officials.

Upon being questioned, the UNRWA’s spokesman Chris Gunness responded that this map spoke of pre-1948 Palestine but such assertions don’t really hold under scrutiny. As Palestinian Media Watch reported, “UNRWA spokesperson Gunness’ justification that the map ‘depict[s] a pre-1948 map’ is baseless, as the map includes the PLO-PA flag and not a British flag. That exact map erasing Israel, especially when accompanied by the PA flag, is one of the many ways the PA expresses its rejection of Israel’s existence and right to exist.”.

ISRAEL’S AMBASSADOR TO THE UN PROTESTS.

As Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Ron Prosor, noted, “It’s quite something for UNRWA to insist that the map predates the creation of Israel, given that the PLO only adopted this flag in 1964.” He also explained that the map was titled Arab Palestine and not the British Mandate for Palestine. Additionally, the map displayed Israel’s neighbors Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria with their contemporary borders, further underlining the fact that the map spoke of the present and not the past.

Prosor has sent in a letter of protest to the United Nations as a result of this incident. “Many in the international community doubt UNRWA’s impartiality and motives,” the letter reads. “Israel supports UNRWA’s important humanitarian work; however, actions that encourage incitement, conflict and, ultimately, violence undermine this work.” Prosor concluded, “UNRWA’s grasp of history and geography is nothing short of appalling.”.